Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Building a Better Mitt Romney-Bot

At the Peterborough Town House in New Hampshire last month.Credit
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times

“Your story about dust regulation captures my interest,” Mitt Romney said to the farmer, sounding as if he actually meant it. It was a late October afternoon in Treynor, Iowa, the setting for one of those campaign meta-events at which a presidential candidate enjoys a casual moment with real people that is in fact carefully staged and dutifully broadcast by multitudes of local and national reporters hovering a few feet away. In this instance, Romney was participating in a round-table discussion with a dozen local businessmen — his kind of folks — and exhibiting his teacher’s-pet flair for spewing out entrepreneurial minutiae.

He peppered them with questions. To an energy producer: “High sulfur or low sulfur content? And how clean is the system you’re able to employ? Do you have a trading system for SOx and NOx?” To a feedlot operator, Romney inquired about the number of heads of cattle and their intended purpose. And while discussing renewable energy with an ethanol C.E.O., the candidate offered up a modest smile and said: “When I was a boy, the kind of numbers — help me with my memory on this — but an acre could produce 60 bushels of corn. And now it’s about 160 bushels of corn, is that about right?”

“Governor, I’m sorry, but we’re running a little short on time,” Romney’s advance director, Will Ritter, cut in a few minutes later.

“O.K., I’ll be a little bit shorter,” the candidate promised. Nonetheless, all of this unscripted, free-enterprise small talk cohered into a larger point — indeed, it was the point, the message, the Tao of Mitt, if you will — and in case anyone failed to see it, the candidate spelled it out during the round-table discussion: “I can only tell you this from spending 25 years in business: I understand business.”

That same day, the local organizers had planned press availability with Romney. But the national campaign nixed the idea — just as it had long dispensed with the freewheeling “Ask Mitt Anything” Q. and A.’s, some 200 of which the candidate subjected himself to during the 2008 campaign. “You can’t control the message,” one of Romney’s senior advisers later explained to me. “But at a business round table, it’s much more easily controlled because you’re having a group of businessmen, and you’re talking about the economy and the challenges that they may be facing, and Mitt is very conversant on those points.”

Similarly, this adviser went on, Romney’s five sons, who were ubiquitous features of the previous campaign — and whose affluent preppiness was the subject of much snarky commentary — would be far less present this time around. “The campaign’s interest and focus is on the economy message, not so much on showing the entire dimension of the family.” He went on, “It just doesn’t fit.” After the eldest Romney boy, Tagg, was teasingly invited in a Twitter post to “tailgate for the next debate” by the daughters of Jon Huntsman, “he wanted to Tweet with the Huntsman girls,” said the adviser. Smiling faintly, the adviser added, “No Tweeting.”

Mitt Romney’s campaign has decided upon a rather novel approach to winning the presidency. It has taken a smart and highly qualified but largely colorless candidate and made him exquisitely one-dimensional: All-Business Man, the world’s most boring superhero. In the recent past, aspirants and their running mates have struggled to clear the regular-guy bar. Dan Quayle lacked a sense of struggle; Michael Dukakis couldn’t emote even when asked what he would do if his wife were raped and murdered; George H. W. Bush seemed befuddled by a grocery-store scanner; John Kerry was a windsurfer; John McCain couldn’t count all of his houses.

Romney, a socially awkward Mormon with squishy conservative credentials and a reported worth in the range of $190 million to $250 million, is betting that in 2012, recession-weary voters want a fixer, not a B.F.F. As the Romney campaign’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, told me: “The economy is overwhelmingly the issue. Our whole campaign is premised on the idea that this is a referendum on Obama, the economy is a disaster and Obama is uniquely blocked from being able to talk about jobs.”

Meanwhile, Romney has been the race’s putative front-runner from the outset. It’s true that a low ceiling of support has loomed over him for months, while Republicans have anxiously searched all corners for an alternative. Nonetheless, his challengers appear to be self-immolating one by one and have done little to warrant his attention. Whenever Romney does step out of his tightly circumscribed “I understand business” framework, it is to appeal to conservatives by attacking the president’s dubious appreciation of capitalism — saying that Obama “fails to understand America,” that he regards the United States as “just another country with a flag” and that he takes his inspiration “from the socialist Democrats of Europe.”

I heard Romney make the last two comments during recent campaign stops in Iowa, where the first Republican contest will take place Jan. 3. In a clear reversal of previous election cycles, a Bloomberg poll last month indicated that 71 percent of Iowa Republicans polled viewed fiscal concerns as the predominant issue. Iowa is there for Romney to win. The same poll showed Herman Cain with 20 percent support, Ron Paul with 19 percent, Romney with 18 percent and Newt Gingrich with 17 percent. (In recent weeks, Gingrich has risen, following Perry’s and Cain’s reigns as candidate of the moment.) The statistical dead heat reveals that this time around, the social conservatives who tend to predominate at the Iowa caucuses — and who view Romney with deep distrust — have yet to coalesce around a particular favorite, as they did with the former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee in 2008. Back then, Huckabee benefited from an unexpectedly high turnout, taking 34 percent of the vote to Romney’s 25 percent.

In this year’s muddled field, his staff believes that he could win with his totals from 2008. They also believe that he doesn’t have to win Iowa — that he could take second or even third and then move on to New Hampshire, where he maintains a summer home and is considered a heavy favorite. Amid a flawed and far less financially endowed field, Romney’s staff has every reason to believe that he could effectively clinch the nomination in less than a month, after the Florida primary on Jan. 31.

There’s a far less favorable possibility, of course, and it, too, begins with the Iowa contest, which the Romney campaign views with great wariness, as if it might be some kind of sting operation. Despite the obvious rewards of going all in and delivering an early knockout blow in Iowa, Romney’s advisers do not want to risk ginning up expectations that their candidate may again fail to meet. Even worse, they fear that he will reanimate the image of him as a flip-flopper willing to tell the state’s conservatives whatever they wish to hear, which in turn will dog him into New Hampshire and beyond as it did the last time around. As Doug Gross, the 2008 Romney campaign’s Iowa chairman, told me: “He tried to be somebody he wasn’t. That’s why he lost.”

The spin Romney himself puts on his minimalist approach is that after nearly four years of nonstop campaigning, “people know me pretty well.” And yet the unintended signal sent by his narrow casting is that the less said about Mitt Romney, the better. Obama’s strategists ran an entire presidential campaign through the affecting tapestry of his own narrative. Romney — who has written two books, both scantily personal — maintains an uneasy distance from his own life story, steeped as it is in privilege, Mormonism and the murky art of political compromise. His avoidance of these subjects does not mean that they will go away, only that his opponents will have an opening to frame them as they wish.

Still, it may well be that this strategy of underwhelming force ends up fitting perfectly with a pervasive sense of disillusionment with the once-dazzling Obama. In the aftermath of failed romance with the One, perhaps the electorate will come to settle on Mitt Romney as the One Who Won’t Break Your Heart.

The unmarked three-story waterfront building at 585 Commercial Street at the base of the Charlestown Bridge in Boston’s North End seems more aptly suited for a numbers racket than for Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters. In 2007, during Romney’s previous campaign, burglars (apparently unaffiliated politically) broke in and made off with several computers. Plans to demolish the vacant structure and replace it with condominiums were forestalled, allowing the Romneyites to move back in last year. This fall, a group of Occupy Boston protesters brought nearby traffic to a standstill but were unaware of the building’s inhabitants and left it unharassed.

The equally bleak panorama inside — grimy industrial carpet, halfhearted wall adornments and the occasional piece of paper taped to a door announcing that the person inside is in charge of “Strategy” or some such — is a testament both to a campaign’s tunnel vision and to the fact that the wealthy Romney is a rather tightfisted fellow. (For a time, he elected to save money at his PAC headquarters in Lexington by not installing land lines, even though cellphones did not work inside the building.) Particularly unkempt is the corner office on the second floor, with its clutter of unused exercise equipment, mislaid cups of espresso and a blender half-full of yesterday’s purple energy drink. Its occupant is the Romney campaign’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens.

Stevens, a 58-year old Mississippi native (whom I have known for over a decade), is as wry, eclectic and mussed in appearance as his boss is earnest and buttoned up. Stevens has skied the North Pole, run successful campaigns in Albania and the Democratic Republic of Congo and assisted Vice President Dick Cheney in his debate preparation against John Edwards in 2004. He wrote an early episode of the hit TV series “Northern Exposure” and consulted on Hollywood projects (including the movie “The Ides of March”) with the politics junkie George Clooney, who after spending considerable time in Washington finally agreed with Stevens’s contention that it is the most sexless city in America. Though Stevens’s customary facial expression is the faintly smiling, middle-distance squint of someone lost in abstraction, he can be direct and combative in the extreme and has the reputation, as a prominent G.O.P. consultant who admires Stevens’s talent put it, of one who “does not play well with others.”

Stevens gravitates toward nonideological Republicans — his client list has included Bob Dole, Charlie Crist and another former G.O.P. governor of Massachusetts, William Weld — and hoped to run Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign. But he was beaten out by Mike Murphy, an equally colorful strategist (the two dislike each other). In the summer of 2007, after defecting with his business partner, Russ Schriefer, from the McCain campaign to produce ads for the Romney team, Stevens found that he had joined an already top-heavy staff — and that Murphy, among others, had already laid out a jumble of messaging strategies. As one Romney adviser now concedes: “We brought on a lot of people because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We were new to the national stage, and we wanted as much input and advice as we could get, and we also wanted to demonstrate to the world that we could win that invisible primary. So we had a lot of voices, and they weren’t unanimous on every point.”

Even Romney, for whom heaven is an eternal round-table discussion, came to recognize that the proliferation of highly paid consultants had reached the point of diminishing returns. This time around, he has pared down his front office. Still onboard are a few old hands; one of them, Beth Myers, told Romney that the 2008 campaign lacked a single day-to-day strategist — and that for 2012, Stuart Stevens should be that person.

Stevens and his partner, Schriefer, have instilled focus in a campaign that previously seemed a bit grasping. Gone is the weighty Romney entourage as well as the lavish ad buys, which always struck Stevens as presumptuous. (A favorite Stevens axiom: “If you don’t enter this process humbly, you will leave it humbly.”) Though he does not seem terribly intimidated by Romney’s Republican opponents — to Stevens, Rick Perry brings to mind the townies in the early scenes of “The Deer Hunter” who go loping into Vietnam expecting to kick butt — he refers to the Obama team as “the best campaign organization ever put together” and reminds his colleagues, “The only thing more intoxicating than getting elected president is the terror of losing the power of the White House. They’ll fight savagely to hang onto that power.”

Photo

This time around, Romney's staying in his comfort zone.Credit
Top: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press. Bottom: Marvin Orellana for The New York Times.

Stevens devised the campaign’s refrain “Obama Isn’t Working,” with its dreary recession visuals and testimonials from the jobless posted on a Romney Web site. The strategist’s gift for withering criticism is rubbing off on his boss. Though Romney now and again employs distinctly Mitt-like language when referring to the president as a “well-intentioned” man who’s simply “out of his depth,” the candidate increasingly cleaves to the more jut-jawed message that Obama has “failed America” and doesn’t get “what makes America work” — which segues to the virtues of the übercapitalist Romney, whose new campaign slogan is “Believe in America.”

In the meantime, Stevens and other advisers have counseled Romney to ignore attacks from disapproving conservatives, like the comment made by the Baptist pastor and Perry supporter Robert Jeffress that “Mormonism is a cult.” (“Four years ago, that would have set off all sorts of alarm bells — we would have tried to mobilize our evangelical supporters to counter what Jeffress and others have been saying,” a senior staff member told me.) Romney has quietly courted key figures in the Tea Party movement since its inception two years ago: among his PAC’s first donations was one to the Congressional campaign of Michele Bachmann; he was the first major figure to endorse the current South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley; and he also gave to the losing campaigns of Sharron Angle of Nevada and Christine O’Donnell of Delaware.

But the Romney campaign has made its peace with — and in the general election may make a virtue out of — the fact that he remains despised by the far right. Among this segment is Iowa’s most prominent Tea Party activist, Ryan Rhodes, who told me that Romney’s campaign has not reached out to him and who also said, “You look at his health care plan, the fact that he hired people who lobbied for Solyndra — it takes those issues off the table that you could tie around Obama’s neck.” He went on: “I don’t think he has a major belief system. He’s Mitt Romney. He’s a manager, O.K.?”

In the past, Romney, an English major in college, was reluctant to let others put words in his mouth. But those running his campaign felt that his prose tended to accentuate Romney’s blandness and wasn’t a good use of his time. (“During the 2008 campaign,” one staff member says, snickering, “I used to tell people: ‘We’re not very happy with our speechwriter, and we want to fire him. His name’s Mitt, and he works on the third floor.’ ”) Stevens, who has made a second career out of writing dialogue for recurring TV characters, persuaded Romney to surrender the speechwriting responsibilities to him — and in recent weeks, Stevens in turn has deferred to the punchy prose of Lindsay Hayes, a former speechwriter for Sarah Palin.

Stevens has also played a hand in Romney’s much-lauded debate performances, which have buttressed the candidate’s assertion that he is best equipped to take on the rhetorically deft Obama. The previous campaign’s debate sessions were, says one adviser, “like an Economics 101 course in college, just a lot of people sitting auditorium-style with their computers.” This year’s prepping has involved fewer contributors conjuring sound bites. “All we do is argue,” says Stevens, who has coached Romney to not get entangled in the specifics of a question. Instead: Hear the topic, zone out the rest, say what you’re about, don’t get hung up on how the crowd responds. It’s not about the room. It’s about the answer.

Another Stevens maxim is “You’ve got to dig the ditch you’re going to die in” — or, less metaphorically, “You have to be willing to lose,” a slogan that he and Schriefer inscribed on a message board early on in the campaign. It’s a rousing sentiment that Romney has taken to heart in his forceful defense of the Massachusetts health care law that some admirers have begged the ex-governor to disavow. During such moments, Romney seems to project the confident air of a chief executive who spends little time fretting over what other people think.

More often, however, Mitt Romney the data-driven former corporate consultant seems like a man puzzling his way to victory, doing and saying whatever might solve the problem immediately at hand. In Iowa, I watched as the candidate confronted the dicey issue of ethanol subsidies at the Treynor business round table like a man who had no intentions of losing, dying, ditch-digging or anything else except ingratiating. First he stipulated that “I supported the subsidy of ethanol to help get the industry on its feet.” After qualifying that support by saying, “I didn’t feel the subsidy needed to go on forever,” Romney noted that the subsidy was due to expire in December anyway. He qualified that observation by remarking, “I might’ve looked at more of a decline over time. . . .” But, he cheerfully observed, “most people I know in the ethanol industry say, ‘Fine — we’re now up and going.’ ” Lest anyone doubt his commitment, Romney reminded his audience, “For me, ethanol is part of national security — it is part of America developing our own energy. . . . And I would like to see the ethanol industry continue to be successful to grow and to provide a growing share of America’s domestic energy sources.

“And how to do that,” he finished with an unsteady grin, “as Ross Perot used to say, I’m all ears!”

Among Stevens’s colorful analogies, the unlikeliest is one in which he compares Romney to Michael Vick, the dynamic quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles. “Michael Vick’s not a real good pocket guy,” Stevens told me. “So don’t tell him he can’t roll out. Try to make him the best rollout guy that’s ever played.” And indeed, Romney’s staff has endeavored to focus the campaign on his strengths, which are decidedly the opposite of Vick’s. So instead of letting their quarterback roam and improvise, they’re keeping him tightly contained in the business-centric pocket, hoping to God that he does not stray from it.

Romney has been spending a great deal of time lately with Republicans who want to like him. On Oct. 26, he met with 61 Republican members of Congress who had either already endorsed him or were considering doing so. “The thing I try to convey to my colleagues is, ‘Mitt Romney is not going to embarrass you — he’s the most vetted candidate out there,’ ” says Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who helped organize the gathering. In that sense, Romney did not disappoint. Though he devoted the bulk of his talk to the economy, he also made the point, Chaffetz says, “that in the general election he’s going to be very attractive to both Republicans and independents.”

Still, one attendee was annoyed when Romney gave a lengthy explanation for his conversion on the abortion issue and then concluded with the stilted formulation, “I come down on the side of pro-life.” The representative confronted Romney and said, “That’s not going to work with my rural voters.”

Another congressman, Darrell Issa of California, offered the former Massachusetts governor a suggestion. “Instead of always telling people this is what you’re going to do, tell them how you did it,” Issa said. “Like when you had a budget deficit and went through it line by line with each department head — that really resonates with people who go through their own budgets line by line. It’s more personal.”

Romney considered the idea, then carefully said, “I’m going to have to figure out how to do that.” Implicit in his response was that Romney’s four years dealing with the Democrat-controlled Massachusetts State Legislature — one in which the governor showed himself to be, as one adviser puts it, “a conciliator” and “a practical politician” — is a story best left for the general election. (Or avoided entirely. As another Romney campaign strategist observes, “It’s a terrible time to be running based on your experience in government.”)

Later that afternoon, Romney met with two House Republican leaders: Paul Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman, and Kevin McCarthy, the majority whip. Romney wanted to discuss Medicare reform with Ryan, who says he encouraged the candidate to “be bold, be specific and defend yourself.” The plan Romney would unveil a week later — one that allows future senior citizens to choose between traditional Medicare and a private health insurance plan — amounts to a compromise proposal that Ryan acknowledges­ is politically safer than his, and which he is “perfectly comfortable with.”

McCarthy also counseled boldness. “Look, no candidate ever wants to have a primary challenge, but it always makes you stronger,” the majority whip told Romney. He added, “You’ve got to have that Reagan-and-the-microphone moment.” (He was referring to the 1980 debate in which the candidate Reagan proclaimed, “I am paying for this microphone,” appearing decisive.) “People are just starving for a leader,” McCarthy said.

Hearing such stories, you get the notion that Republicans yearning for victory are calling out for something brilliant and yet unseen to burst out of Romney’s gray chrysalis. Simultaneously earthbound and, as one Republican congresswoman puts it, “a little too perfect,” Romney seems, even to himself, an ill fit for his newly chosen vocation. While trying to win over voters in New Hampshire in early 2008, he turned to an aide and said: “You know, I’ve done a lot of stuff. I’ve started companies, I ran companies, I ran the Olympics. This is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done!” He added, laughing, “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

The chief vulnerability of the Romney campaign resides with the understandable decision to keep their anti-Michael Vick in the pocket, thereby limiting our view of the man. Those who at close range watched Romney’s failure to close the deal in 2008 did not witness a rejection per se. Instead, it appeared that Republican voters could not quite envision this decent, clever and socially uneasy fellow governing their country — as opposed to, say, managing their stock portfolios. Stories of Romney’s wooden people skills are legion. “The Mormon’s never going to win the who-do-you-want-to-have-a-beer-with contest,” concedes one adviser, while another acknowledges, “He’s never had the experience of sitting in a bar, and like, talking.”

To his admiring subordinates, Romney is the man who, while waiting in an aide’s garage during an advertising shoot, took it upon himself to sweep it spick-and-span. He is the boss who hosted a 2008 post-mortem at his house in Belmont, Mass., and instead of demanding answers or fixing blame, passed out photo albums of the campaign for each staff member to keep. One longtime aide maintains that Romney is, no matter how much of a corporate barracuda the Democrats make him out to be, “more Richie Cunningham of ‘Happy Days’ than Gordon Gekko” of “Wall Street.” And he possesses an almost otherworldly unflappability — seen, for example, on a public street in 2009, when a detractor who recognized Romney cursed at him.“Well!” remarked Romney to a companion. “I guess somebody’s having a bad day!”

Romney’s associates maintain that his genial and humble aspect masks a voracious intellect. A longtime friend of Romney’s explained to me that a desire to digest all available viewpoints was the thread that ran through the candidate’s entire professional life. At Bain Capital, said the friend, Romney “wanted hardworking people who would challenge him — he plays devil’s advocate, trying not only to understand what you think the answer is but what your depth of thinking is.” While turning around the troubled Winter Olympics in Utah, “he brought in a management team with divergent views.” As governor, Romney “wanted a cabinet that would argue different points of view.”

The friend then hastened to assure me that Romney was, beyond all that discursiveness, a decisive leader. But as a presidential candidate, he does not always display his intellectual rigor in his policy proposals. An adviser once told me about how in 2007 Romney reacted to the news that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was planning on visiting ground zero during a United Nations convention. First, the candidate engaged in a debate with his foreign-policy aide, Dan Senor. Then the two men switched sides and argued opposite positions. Finally, Romney called for someone to bring him the United Nations Charter, which he read and discussed at length with Senor.

But in the end, Romney’s response to the Ahmadinejad visit was unremarkable. He released a four-sentence press statement denouncing the Iranian leader’s intentions as “shockingly audacious” and concluding that rather than “entertaining Ahmadinejad, we should be indicting him.”

Photo

A Romney supporter from New Hampshire.Credit
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times

I asked the campaign staff if I could talk to Romney about his economic proposals. They replied that in the interests of controlling the campaign’s message, the candidate would not be participating in any profiles or “proc­ess stories.” Instead, they suggested I speak with the campaign’s policy director, Lanhee Chen, a highly respected Harvard Ph.D., who did his best to characterize Romney’s views. The problem is that when you look beneath Mitt Romney’s critique of the Obama economy, his remedies feel a bit thin.

Asked what President Romney would have done during his first days in office, in lieu of a federal stimulus, to address the market meltdown, Chen rattled off a few likely options: “Lowering the corporate tax rate. Enacting a permanent extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Immediately ratifying our pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. In the energy sector, freeing up the necessary land to enable greater domestic production.” He did not make clear how Romney would have steered these boilerplate conservative proposals through a Democrat-controlled Congress.

I asked Chen about Romney’s recent recommendation that the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment of the Arts be targeted for federal spending cuts. Was the candidate proposing that these two federal agencies, long opposed by conservative groups, be eliminated altogether? “We haven’t specifically discussed that,” Chen said.

These programs had a combined annual budget of less than $500 million. Meanwhile, Romney previously criticized President George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D prescription-drug program for its exorbitant cost — “the actual balance-sheet impact . . . [is] now estimated to be approximately $8 trillion,” he wrote. Had Romney discussed repealing the pricey entitlement? “It was not under consideration,” Chen replied.

Romney’s policy director had thorough responses to about half of my inquiries. He didn’t know if the candidate’s heavy criticism of Obama’s “green jobs” initiatives meant that Romney was skeptical of a green-jobs industry on its face. He didn’t know what exemptions Romney would eliminate in pursuit of a flatter tax code. Asked if Romney agreed with Michele Bachmann’s sentiment that every adult American should pay taxes, Chen replied, “I don’t have anything for you there.” Finally, I asked for clarification of a remark I heard Romney make on the campaign trail in western Iowa: “You cannot have a strong economy without strong families and strong values.” While I could appreciate how that sentiment would appeal to Iowa’s social conservatives, the logic wasn’t especially clear.

“You know, it’s a general comment on the importance that strong families have in our country’s economic strength,” Chen said. He recalled that Romney expanded on the topic at the Values Voters Summit a few weeks back and referred me to the speech.

Here is what it says on the subject: “The foundation needed for a strong economy and a strong military is a people of strong values.”

Romney’s newest book, “No Apology,” similarly represents how the candidate’s intellectual vigor gives ground to political calibrations. Romney decided to write the book immediately after bowing out of the race in February 2008. “I can live with everything that happened in the campaign,” he told aides. What frustrated him was his inability to articulate a vision for the country. Two advisers recall a meeting in the summer of 2008 at which Romney cited as a literary inspiration a book that had been on his mind, about the decline of France following the mass protests of the 1960s — and then proceeded to translate it aloud from French.

While touring the country raising funds for Republican candidates that summer, Romney also pored over texts from British leftists arguing why America’s decline as a superpower should be welcomed. He told aides to thrash out big ideas for the book, and he envisioned gathering roomfuls of experts. After first hiring a ghostwriter, Romney then decided that he would prefer to write it himself. He spent most of the first half of 2009 at his new home in La Jolla, Calif., typing away on his laptop while e-mailing his researcher for details on radical Islam and the fall of the Roman Empire.

For those political insiders who had been hearing murmurs that Romney was intending to write a “Tom Friedman-esque” book, it came as something of a surprise to read “No Apology” — a data-packed but mostly familiar defense of American exceptionalism that, as the title indicates, also devotes ample space to condemning President Obama’s supposed tendency to apologize on the world stage for America’s moral lapses. Where Romney’s book strikes an unusual chord, for a politician anyway, is in its frank recognition that for innovation to thrive, governments must stand back and allow the “creative destruction” of obsolete industries — and the jobs they produce. Readers will recognize in such passages the brisk realism of Mitt Romney, corporate consultant.

Squaring such sentiments with the Mitt Romney who won the Michigan primary in January 2008 is more vexing. More than one adviser told me that Michigan was where Romney “found his voice” — an odd claim, given the widespread view at the time that the primary featured Mitt Romney at his most pandering. While the front-runner, McCain, delivered “straight talk” that some industries in Michigan were unlikely to be rejuvenated and that worker retraining was the more prudent course than trying to “recreate the past” — an argument for creative destruction — Romney labeled his opponent a defeatist and sunnily pledged “to fight for every single job.” (Ten months later, Romney returned to his Bain mind-set and wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”)

Another side of Mitt Romney is ever-so-briefly revealed in “No Apology” — that of a former lay pastor, or “stake president,” at his Mormon church in Boston. Serving in that capacity, Romney wrote, “I cannot count the number of times I consoled or counseled a person who had lost a job.” In a couple of short but moving paragraphs, the author recites a few such poignant moments before concluding, “Ever since these experiences, unemployment is not merely a statistic for me.” Sheryl Gay Stolberg independently confirmed Romney’s counseling interactions in an article in this paper. But Romney refused to be interviewed on the subject, and his campaign staff also declined to assist Stolberg, just as my inquiries on his time as Mormon stake president were, unlike my queries on other subjects, met with silence.

“He’s probably taken it off the table because he feels that the downside of bringing up his Mormon leadership responsibility is greater than his upside,” says Doug Cropper, a Romney supporter and Mormon bishop in Davenport, Iowa. “And I understand it.”

The unintended consequence is that it leaves less of Mitt Romney to understand — and, correspondingly, more room for doubt.

It’s very unlikely that we’ll ever hear Mitt Romney and Barack Obama openly discuss the things they have in common. Nonetheless, we may well see in the general election a contest between two dispassionate and accommodating pragmatists and skilled debaters who relish intellectual give-and-take, and whose willingness to compromise has infuriated the party faithful. Both have promised change. Each will frame the other as being not up to the task.

How ably Romney the nominee will defend himself, given the kid-gloves treatment by his current competition and the campaign’s avoidance of large segments of his own life story, is difficult to say just yet. In early November I watched Romney return to Iowa for only the fourth time. He stopped in Dubuque and Davenport and, before decent-size crowds, essentially regurgitated his address on the economy from the week before. In both cases he spoke for less than 20 minutes and did not take questions from the audience. Far more of his ground time was devoted to filming promotional material in a Dubuque sheet-metal factory, where the footage would capture the candidate seeming engaged in the kind of heart-to-heart dialogues with working-class Americans that the campaign had otherwise left off his schedule that day.

Near the end of his talk in Davenport, he said to the 275 east Iowans in attendance, “I want you to get to know me a little better.” After wrapping up his speech, he moved briskly through the crowd, pausing now and then to take photos and sign autographs, before flying out of Iowa with Stuart Stevens and a couple of other staff members.

The following morning in Des Moines, I met with Romney’s former Iowa chairman, Doug Gross. The strategist recalled how he had gotten off to a rocky start with the Romneys when he first traveled to Boston to meet them in the spring of 2007. That day, Gross brought up Romney’s potential liabilities in Iowa — including his previously progressive stances on abortion and gays, along with his Mormon faith — and warned that he would have to prove that he could relate to average voters. According to Gross (and confirmed by someone else who was there): “He got mad, his wife stormed out and he never talked to me the rest of the night. They found it insulting.”

Romney nonetheless hired Gross, who believes that the results of that 2008 campaign vindicated his initial concerns. Despite being asked to rejoin the campaign this year, he has not done so. I asked him if he had any reservations as to whether Mitt Romney would be a good president.

“Yeah,” he immediately replied. “That’s why I haven’t committed. To be an excellent president — part of the rap on Mitt is that he’s too flexible. I see that as a good thing, because it shows he’s willing to be pragmatic and do what works.

“But,” added Mitt Romney’s former Iowa chairman, “I don’t know if he’s got the gut instinct to make the right call at the right time. I don’t know yet.”

Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is working on a book about the House of Representatives.